I hope the information of this section will allow you to start creating panoramic images and spherical Quicktime VRs of your own. Or maybe better understand the processes involved. If you want to add or correct something, or just submit a question, use the contact form.

With a 10.5mm Nikon lens, the size of the "hole" on the nadir, when creating a Quicktime VR, can be significantly reduce, and then reducing the amount of work in Photoshop. To do this, you simply need to tilt your camera when shooting the last 6 shots row until you can see the panoramic head in the lower part of the photo (-10°, -15°...). The size of the circle to edit will then depend on the size of the panoramic head used.

There is almost no quality difference in the overlapping area with the zenith if you shot your pictures with a closed enough aperture, choose FINE or RAW as your saving parameters and with an angle allowing a good overlap.The following details are from a 'normal' render (0°) and a render with tilted images (-15°) of 10.000x5.000 pixels/Smartblend.

zoom (0°) - zoom (-15°)

zoom (0°) - zoom (-15°)

Horizon

The current available softwares (Stitcher, PTGui) allow to align a panorama with a single click.

Exemple and images

You can find here the final fullscreen Quicktime VR file and all the composing images- Download the ZIP file 6+1+1/-15° (21 MB)Note: The nodal point of my images is not really... not at all perfect :-)

The stitching can be done with Stitcher Unlimited (http://stitcher.realviz.com), PTGUI 5.x (http://ptgui.com)..., etcYou can see here the four steps to create this panorama with Stitcher : from the loading of the 'fisheye' images, the automatic stitching and aligment, to the final render of the panorama (using smart blending option)

[1] Loading fiseye images

[2] Automatic stitching

[3] Aligment

[4] Result

[5] Rendering parameters

[6] Final render

Nadir Patching

The correction of the nadir can be done easier and quicker now. It's possible, if it doesn't have a lot of details, to use only the "patch" tool without using the 8th photo (often taken handheld). For more information, watch the video about the realisation of a Quicktime VR : Open the video in a new window - Dowload the video (ZIP 32 MB)

Hardware / Pano head

For all these tests, I used a Nodal Ninja 3 (http://nodalninja.com) panoramic head because it has a very small base. (Thanks to Bill Bailey for his help)

All photographs are copyright "Eric Rougier / FromParis.com". Please, do not to use without written authorization. The pyramid of the Louvre museum: Leoh Ming Pei, architect. "La Geode": Adrien Fainsilber, architect. The "Grande Arche": Otto van Spreckelsen, architect. Bibliotheque Nationale de France: Dominique Perrault, architect. Lighting of the Eiffel Tower is copyright "Societe Nouvelle d'Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel". Some history texts are licensed to the public under the Creative License and, or wikipedia sourcesZoomify (tm) is a trademark of Zoomify Inc. QuickTime (tm) and QuicktimeVR (tm) are trademarks of Apple Computer.